I am a thicky....... just worked out what GTG means....Global travel group...... Mmmm well looking on the atol website GTG is listed with a list of holiday companies that work under there ATOL protection but HOLIDAY GEMS is not listed........ the plot thickens.

Hi Joanne
GTG has umpteen (probably well into 100's) of travel agencies, both online and high street, as part of their group, all of which trade and package holidays under the GTG ATOL. They are not listed on the ATOL checker.
There is no reason to think that Holidays Gems are scamming by using that number. I'm pretty sure the GTG would have picked up on it by now, if they were using their number illegally.

Unless something has changed in the last few weeks I'd say they are still genuine GTG members. Their MD had been a director at GTG before setting up Holiday Gems so I think GTG would notice if he suddenly dropped off the list.

One coincedence I've only just noticed is that Triton Rooms (the bed bank used here) has it's registered address in the same building as GTG, just outside Chester. So maybe the web isn't as tangled as it first looked!

well good luck with it- I hope you take them to the cleaners.
Read with interest above re hard and soft losses. I would say that the situation in this case was so serious it couldnt have failed to have impacted on your holiday- being locked out of your room and having your bank card held to ransom in a strange country with a young child in your party. HG should be utterly ashamed of themselves- this goes way beyond a change of flight time.

I look forward to hearing back from you on here when you have settled with them. If I were in your shoes I would also go to the press with this...

steve

Triton rooms are an agency only bed bank, and are the in house accommodation supplier for Global Travel, so would make sense to share the same building.

I would raise an action. You have nothing to lose by raising one. Also pending actions against a company are never good for them. So I would urge you just to do it to cause some trouble for this company. I think it may be the only way they would learn.

To everyone that has been following this complaint, i have today posted Holidaygems a letter before action, with everyones advise on both here and another web site i am planning to take them all the way to the courts.
I am also trying to blog my complaint on the www so if anyone puts in Holidaygems it will direct them to my complaint, not sure yet how to do this yet though but seems a good idea.(saw it this morning on 'DONT GET DONE GET DOM'......... Might even email him...lol

if you Google Holiday Gems it brings you to here, as it did before you booked with them. And therein lies the problem - most people only do searches after something goes wrong.

The BBC will no doubt have dozens of holiday complaints to run with, they did manage to get a daytime series out of them a few months ago. I know you feel hard done by but by the standards of awfulness that the travel industry has your complaint is quite low down and Holiday Gems hardly feature. Spend and evening going through other peoples complaints and other companies histories on this board. You've got grounds for court action but so do thousands who have holdiay problems each year.

What concerns me is that this complaint has been running for a week and the MD hasn't been in touch - which is not like him. I wonder if something has happened? Might explain why you haven't had any response to your letter.

Yes it has been running a week and i havent heard anythink off the MD yet, he might be waiting to meet me in court. I was in the begining quiet happy to recieve my mobile bill and part compensation for a ruin holiday, but after the ignorance i have received i have had second thoughts. 80% of my holiday was ruined through the non payment of my holiday. What would of happened if i had not even got a bank card with me.??
The hotel were adament they were not going to give us a room without some form of payment, the holiday spending money was in that account. If we had taken the holiday money as cash we would of only had enough money for 1 nights stay.
As it took 5 days to sort where would we have been sleeping for the other 4, in the desert for all Holiday gems cared, 2 females and a 5 year old little girl.........

UPDATE :

Posted my letter before action yesterday and i recieved a letter sent 2nd class post from Holidaygems today. They are offering me my full mobile bill back of £152.82 plus £100 compensation....... well for saying it has cost me 3 recorded delivery costs and 3 long phone calls that will give me approx £80 compensation for 5 days totally ruined. Dont think i will be accepting this, will wait for the reply if i get one from the LBA i sent yesterday. They have admitted it was there fault, saying there was confusion between there supplier due to a late notice of overbooking on the hotel. What they do not know is i have 2 emails directly from the hotel in egypt the day before we flew stating we had a booking with them and they looked forward to meeting us the next day. The hotel was never overbooked at all. We had a room booked at this hotel 3 weeks prior to departure and 1 day before there was never at any time a loss of this.
I had been in contact with the hotel because we were asking how much it would cost to have another person added to the room. Holiday gems advised me 3 weeks previously that if i wanted to add another person to the party it would have to cancel the booking with fees and rebook the holiday costing me several hundred pounds in cancellation fees, they advised me that it might be better if i did it direct with the hotel and book the flight, unfortunally it was to expensive for this person to join the party so she never came with us.
They are very sorry that we experienced a very poor start to our holiday........If 5 days of worry/stress and tears in receptions, frantically having to email to try to get a friend to put money into my account is a poor start and worth £100 they are massively mistaken.

they do know about your emails because they read everything you write on here!

refresh my memory, who are the LBA?

JOANNE1505 wrote:

80% of my holiday was ruined.

JOANNE1505 wrote:

UPDATE :They are offering me my full mobile bill back of £152.82 plus £100 compensation....... well for saying it has cost me 3 recorded delivery costs and 3 long phone calls that will give me approx £80 compensation for 5 days totally ruined. Dont think i will be accepting this

So, what sort of figure would you deem reasonable?

ATB,J.

refresh my memory, who are the LBA?

Sorry steve8482,
LBA is an anagram of 'Letter before Action'

So, what sort of figure would you deem reasonable?

Merseygull,

If they stick another nought on it then thats a good start as compensation, the holiday cost me £1800. 80% ruined with worry, locked out from our belongings for 5 days in a row,if i had not got a debit card then we would not of even had a hotel room to even stay in, i hadn't planned to take a bank card but to be safe and not carry cash i did, that was our saving grace. We never got the chance to go on any trips we had planned. This was a holiday of a lifetime for us and a year planning of our holiday was destroyed with there incomptence.

i know someone mentioned further up that in the scheme of things this would be quite far down the list of seriousness but I have to beg to differ. I think this story is horrific and is my worst nightmare. How on earth can you put it behind you and just get on and enjoy the holiday not knowing if you are going to be kicked out or your bank account cleaned of money.

I hope you get the refund you deserve, well done for having the courage to see it through.

your worst nightmare is being worried your holiday might go wrong?

what i meant (we were discussing whether the BBC would take it up) is that every year there are loads of people who really do get stranded and have their money taken etc. etc. There is a difference between worrying about being stuck on the streets and actually being stuck on the streets. In terms of the cases of actual loss and hardship we'll see a lot worse this year.

There's no doubt that the holiday was wrecked but putting a price on worry and hassle is always a hard job. Do I think it's worth £1000 in this case -yes. Do I think Joanne will get it without risking an even more expensive court case - no! To get the money in court would mean proving HG were to blame AND that £1000 is the value. County Court fees have to be paid in advance and are based on amount claimed so you have to put down (and risk) more as your claim gets bigger.

err, no, I was referring to the specifics of this case rather than a generic 'going wrong' - I thought that was obvious from my message but sorry if that wasnt clear.
People moan about things'going wrong' on their holidays all the time - flight delays, change of departure airport, small hotel rooms. I have seen things of a less serious nature than this covered on nightmare holiday programmes

What they do not know is i have 2 emails directly from the hotel in egypt the day before we flew stating we had a booking with them and they looked forward to meeting us the next day.

I'm a bit confused by this - are you saying that 24 hrs before you were due to arrive that the hotel didn't think that there was a problem with your booking and confirmed that you did have one with them but that by the time you arrived they had decided that there was a problem? I don't know how far in advance agents usually actually pay hotels for their bookings - I'm sure one of the travel professionals on the forum would know - but I would have expected it to be either more than 24 hrs in advance of arrival (especially for a booking made months earlier) or retrospectively after your stay as part of an invoicing system for payment for all beds booked eg that month at that hotel. It seems odd that the hotel was expecting to be paid sometime between sending you the email telling you that they were expecting the next day and you actually arriving. Does anybody in the travel business know if this is usual practice in the trade?

SM

I'm a bit confused by this - are you saying that 24 hrs before you were due to arrive that the hotel didn't think that there was a problem with your booking and confirmed that you did have one with them but that by the time you arrived they had decided that there was a problem? I don't know how far in advance agents usually actually pay hotels for their bookings - I'm sure one of the travel professionals on the forum would know - but I would have expected it to be either more than 24 hrs in advance of arrival (especially for a booking made months earlier) or retrospectively after your stay as part of an invoicing system for payment for all beds booked eg that month at that hotel. It seems odd that the hotel was expecting to be paid sometime between sending you the email telling you that they were expecting the next day and you actually arriving. Does anybody in the travel business know if this is usual practice in the trade?

SM